ramblings on the life of art and the art of living…

Leslie’s Red & Something Journal

This time change spring forward is killing me. I’ve been tired every day since. I’d forgotten to turn the clock ahead before falling asleep on Sunday night, so I awoke on Monday morning an hour late. My first day of work as an “official” employee at the company that I’ve been temping at for almost a year. Wow. It’s an awesome feeling.

Well, on to art. I finally took some photos of Leslie’s red journal; well, at least my contributions. I had dug through my photographs, which I finally brought out of the storage unit last month, and found the photos I’ve been wanting to use in my art work. Some of them are old photos, taken by my parents and some are photos I’d taken prior to leaving Montreal.

The photos I used in one of Leslie’s layouts were taken in Montreal. One is a close-up of a monument in the Mount Royal cemetary, and the other is the tower on Ste-Helene’s Island. I pulled them both into Photoshop and tweaked until I was happy. I printed it out onto transparency and then transferred the image over the top of an already paint-treated page. Then I isolated and printed out the central image once again, and used eyelets to attach it to the page.

The other layout is a photo that I got from iStockphoto.com, a source I use for a lot of source images. I pay per image and part of the benefit is to be able to use them in derivative works (such as collage, etc.). They’re also really reasonably priced, and you don’t have to buy whole collections… you can by single images, in various resolutions. Very cool.

Anyway, to get back to the layout, I was inspired by “The Scarlet Letter” and used it as a springboard, again pulling text into Photoshop along with the images (I also scanned in an “A” stencil) and started playing. I printed the finished work onto canvas (it’s watercolor Canvas by Fredrix); I love using it for inkjet printing, as well as acrylics, gel transfers and collage.